John Irving Quotes

THERE'S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,' he told the voters. 'IF YOU'RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!

If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

it's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

"Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'" said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives."

Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

"You are my work of art," Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. "Everything else has just been a job. I don't know if you've got a work of art in you," Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, "but I know what your job is,and you know what it is, too."

… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.